The work of PAOLO GIOLI is very innovative: a brilliant artist, he is continuously developing new protocols in order to create truly original images. PAOLO GIOLI is an explorer, an experimenter searching for new means that will help him to create images that always surprise.

Thus the series of 16 antique statues from the Vatican Museum presented here that explore the limits of colour photography: instead of photosensitive paper, GIOLI has used, for the shoot, a plate smeared with a phosphorescent substance. The statue was very harshly lit, and its image imprinted on the phosphorescent surface. GIOLI then placed photographic paper in direct contact with that plate, obtaining the photograph we look at.

In these photographs, that the Pompidou Centre has called ‘real jewels’, it’s no longer a question of snapshots but rather a question of remanence and persistence. Time is thus fixed in the photograph. This artifice is not only a technical process, it’s above all a digression in our perception of the image, a radical questioning of the connection between representation and subject, at the antipodes of any decisive moment.

PAOLO GIOLI, born in Rovigo, Italy, in 1942, is considered by those who are familiar with his work as one of the greatest living photographers. The photographs presented by SAGE Paris, all unique, are in part those that were exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, in 2015.

Presented three times at the Rencontres photographiques d’Arles, his photographs can be found in major private and public collections including those of New York’s MOMA, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

On the occasion of this exhibition, SAGE Paris will be publishing a book with a foreword by Marc Lenot.